Hands On: Smart Fortwo's Electric Car

Wheeling through the narrow streets here, the Smart ForTwo Electric Drive is in its element: a small, maneuverable urban car with room for two people, a half-dozen bags of groceries, and your iPhone in its special cradle on the dash.

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BROOKLYN - Wheeling through the narrow streets here, the Smart ForTwo Electric Drive is in its element: a small, maneuverable urban car with room for two people, a half-dozen bags of groceries, and your iPhone in its special cradle on the dash. It's an advance model of the 250 electric Smarts we'll get, 1250 total the world will get, as Smart launches an electric prototype this fall. If you want one, get in line fast. It's offered as a $599 a month lease for people living in five early adopter regions - the Boston-to-Washington corridor, Indianapolis, Orlando, Portland, and San Jose.

If ever a car was meant to run on electricity, it would be the Smart Fortwo. Its mission in life is to be an urban/suburban commuter for one or two with a bit of luggage. That dovetails neatly with the hundred-mile range of most early electric cars. The price, were you asked to pay the full cost for something three feet shorter than a Mini, is $44,000 by Smart's estimate. That is offset by a $7,500 government subsidy (Smart as the owner keeps it - sorry) and some Smart underwriting of the cost. In exchange, you get a distinctive vehicle that turns heads and, should you desire, provides a convertible option at no extra charge.

How It Handles: Like a Gasoline Smart, Only Quieter Hop in, turn the key, hear a few faint electrical noises, and you're ready to go. Acceleration is modest but capable for urban driving. It's rated at the same 6.5 seconds 0-60 - that's kilometers per hour - as the gasoline version, but electric motors produce their maximum torque (power) at 0 rpm, so startup is brisk.

If you really want to move out, you stand hard on the throttle and the Smart goes into kickback mode, as one of Smart's German executives so quaintly put it. He meant kickdown mode, but speaking as he was on the Brooklyn waterfront, either term was probably appropriate. Since the transmission only has one speed, you're not technically dropping down a gear (the traditional meaning of kickdown) but rather taking advantage of the motor's momentary 40 hp peak output; normally it's 27 hp.

As with the Mini, which also has an electric prototype version, the Mini E, also in the hands of a couple hundred testers, the base car is fun to drive and fun to be seen in, and the green-on-white graphics and green alloy wheels make the Smart Fortwo ED all the more eye-catching. This will do a lot more for your social standing than six-hundred bucks tithed to an environmental fund. And in very few if any places does Smart use the acronym ED instead of Electric Drive for those with Viagra fixations.

The Smart Fortwo ED throttle is easier to control than the Mini E's. The electrified Mini is like a riding mower or a racing kart: either you're on the throttle and moving ahead, or you're off-throttle and decelerating, because Mini uses an aggressive battery regeneration scheme under deceleration that wipes off speed rapidly. Lift the throttle on the ED and you merely coast, step on the brake a little and you're in regeneration mode where the electric motor/generator refills the lithium battery pack, and when you press down harder, you get braking plus regeneration.

Because of the short wheelbase, the Smart is more susceptible to pitching from potholes and uneven pavement than a full-size car. Get used to it. If you centered the Smart on a 4-by-8 sheet of plywood (that fits in the bed of most pickup trucks), it would stick out just six inches of each side.

Something you won't have to get used to is the roundly criticized five-speed automated manual gearbox of the gasoline Smart Fortwo, since this model has a single-speed transmission. If I heard it right at the press conference, a Smart executive described the issue with the five-speed transmission as the drivers' unfamiliarity with its operation, when most reviewers have said the gearbox isn't very good. In other words, why take the rap for an underachieving component when you can blame the victim.

Simple Cockpit, Two Dash-Top Electric Car Gauges

The cockpit is attractive but Spartan. The two dash-top gauge pods that held a tachometer and clock on the gasoline Smart Fortwo are now a battery meter and ammeter. There is no miles-to-empty indicator but since the claimed range is 84 miles and the battery meter reads 0-100, there's almost a one-to-one correlation.

There's a cradle for an Apple iPhone, which you really need to have if you lease the ED, because of the excellent Smart-specific application called the Smart Drive App. In addition to Bluetooth handsfree calling, music management, and navigation, there's a Smart Fortwo ED-specific application showing the state of battery charge and time until the charge is complete. For details, see the adjacent story, Hands-On: Smart Fortwo's Amazing iPhone App.

How It Works Unlike hybrid sedans that lose a chunk of the trunk for the hybrid battery, this installation is pretty much unnoticeable, other than the net gain of 300 pounds, raising the weight to about 2,100 pounds. The motor, transmission, and battery pack all sit under the rear cargo area where the gasoline motor formerly sat. The Tesla-developed lithium battery pack is rated at 16.5 kWh, or the same as about 330 laptop batteries.

There's an onboard 3.3-kW charger that uses the U.S. standard J1772 connector. Smart recommends charging off a 220-volt, 13-amp line which takes you from 20 percent to 80 percent charge in 3.5 hours, although charging from 120 volts is also possible, but then it's pretty much all night to recharge. 440-volt quick charging is possible, although costs are prohibitive to install that in a household garage and there are some questions about wear and tear on the battery with such rapid recharging. By the way, you also need to pay for your own charger, about $2,000-$3,000, although the five test-lease areas include several where a grant program underwrites the cost of chargers.

Should You Lease?There's no way leasing a car with such limited range makes economic sense at $600 a month, especially not as your only car. But if you want to be on the leading edge of a new era for the automobile where the environmental impact is greatly reduced, this is a great way to support the cause. And you'll have lots of fun every time you hop in the Smart Fortwo ED.

Bill Howard is the editor of TechnoRide.com, the car site for tech fans, and writes a column on car technology for PC Magazine each issue. He is also a contributing editor of PC Magazine.
Bill's articles on PCs, notebooks, and printers have been cited five times in the annual Computer Press Association Awards. He was named as one of the industry's ten most influential journalists from 1997 to 2000 by Marketing Computers and is a frequent commentator on TV news and business shows as well...
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